Samsung Notebook 7 Spin (NP740U3L-L02US) Review

By Tech For Pennies

October 7, 2016

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Samsung might not be the most popular laptop manufacturer, but they still make decent computers for on-the-go people. Indeed, Samsung Notebook 7 Spin (NP740U3L-L02US) has received some favorable reviews recently. It’s a Core i5 powered, compact 13.3″ notebook, and in this post you will find my thoughts about it…

The good

Samsung Notebook 7 Spin (NP740U3L-L02US) has Intel Core i5-6200U processor inside. It’s a 2015 model, so not the latest one, but it still got a solid spec sheet: two cores, 2.3GHz clock speed, 2.8GHz turbo. Many people use this (and similar processors) for heavy-duty software such as Photoshop, you can try that too – chances are everything will be nice and smooth.

There’s also 8GB memory installed (2x4GB DDR4 2133MHz), and you can up that to 32GB if you want to. Anyway, the current 8GB should be enough, and for example watching Netflix and YouTube won’t be a problem with it.

The screen looks nice, the size is 13.3 inches and it supports 1920×1080 a.k.a. Full HD resolution. It’s a touch display and it rotates to tablet mode, so the unit is a 2-in-1 laptop. Screen brightness is 300 nits. A low-quality (480p) webcam is embedded on the top.

Backlit keyboard is available.

The neutral

The 1TB hard drive on Samsung Notebook 7 Spin (NP740U3L-L02US) isn’t wonderful, it loses to solid-state drives in terms of performance. But you can still install SSD here, a free M.2 SATA3 slot is available. However, I’ve heard it’s quite tough to get to that slot, it requires some serious disassembling.

Check out what other people are saying about this laptop on Amazon.com.

The laptop has HDMI as the video output, it supports up to 4K UHD resolution on the external monitor. There are also four USB ports in total: one USB-C, one USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0.

Optical drive is not included here. The good thing is, external ones are cheap. MicroSD card slot is anyway installed.

You can get network access with the 2×2 802.11ac WiFi card (Intel AC8260). It also supports Bluetooth 4.1. There’s no RJ-45 port on this laptop.

The battery has 45 watt hours and 3-cell set-up. In manufacturer’s test, it reaches 9-10 hours operating time, but users report around 6 hours. You better believe the latter, it’s more realistic.

The bad

You see, even though many other components in Samsung Notebook 7 Spin (NP740U3L-L02US) are pristine, the graphics engine isn’t. The name is Intel HD 520, and it’s a tiny chip integrated on the processor. You’re not going to be lucky with very heavyweight games like The Witcher 3, but give a try to GTA 5 on low settings and resolution, and FPS like 30FPS should happen. Battlefield 4 is playable too, and of course older games like World of Warcraft are a piece of cake.

Verdict

Samsung Notebook 7 Spin (NP740U3L-L02US) is an appropriate, power user friendly notebook. Its strong points include fast processor, good image quality and ability to upgrade to SSD. One thing to watch for is the gaming performance, it’s not too great with the integrated graphics. But if you’re planning to get a software-only computer, you might as well take a closer look at this snappy Samsung!